Monday, May 21, 2012

The heavens declare His glory

There is a book called "Modern Times" by Paul Johnson.
An excellent history of the last century.
It starts out saying that the Modern World began in 1919 on the island of Pelau where Einstein was proven correct.
The way it worked was that they had a clear night time star map from that island. They then photo'd the stars during a solar eclipse in 1919 from that island. This is how they proved that gravity bent light as much as Einstein predicted.
The more important thing to take away from this is how "lucky" we were that the moon was exactly the right size to block the sun to analyze the surface of the sun (corona) and see the effect the sun's gravity had on starlight.
Bigger: block our view of the gravitational distortion.
Smaller: blind our cameras.
"Lucky".
The heavens declare His glory.
Earth is not the center of the universe.
If it was we'd be dead. In a black hole.
But we have the best view of the universe you could hope for.

Very nice post Ed! I spent a good amount of time last weekend lying on my dock at night, staring up at the Heavens just trying to wrap my feeble little mind around the vastness of His creation. I will try again this weekend.